Mad Times

I saw this on the shelf at Village Books in Bellingham and was intrigued enough by the title that I jotted it down to check out from the library. The answer promised by the title is: Buddhist meditation.

I appreciated how short the book was. I read the whole thing in a couple of hours. The “afraid of your own life” in the title is a shorthand for all the fears that assail us, from fear of failure and fear of loss to fear of external disasters. The book proposes that the experience of fear in the face of these things is counter-productive to a happy life, and that by practicing meditation one can inoculate one’s mind against letting the emotion of fear take over. Piver is an adherent of the Shamatha school of meditation which means “peaceful abiding”. The practice she describes is keyed largely on dismissing active thought during meditation by recognizing when your mind wanders from the task of meditation and labeling the distraction as “thinking” to stop the digression and return to centered null focus.

There are a lot of other specific practices outlined in the book all aimed at performing a kind of mental judo taking negative patterns of thought and channeling that energy in a more positive direction. I haven’t taken on any of the practice in the book and that’s largely because Piver encourages a seven-day induction phase including a three-day full retreat. It’s going to take some effort to make that happen even though it sounds like a good idea in theory.

I’m so far behind on book reviews I need to just fling some out there. I read this book for Endeavour as Priest recently relocated to the northwest. It’s set in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The main character is Eden Moore and like the boy in The Sixth Sense, she sees dead people. And talks to them.

The book is a creeping dread kind of horror thing where the victims of a past atrocity are coming back to get their revenge on the living. They are aided by a major flood.

There are prior books with the Eden Moore character, but I thought this one stood well enough alone. There was clearly a lot of backstory I was lacking, but Priest sketched in the necessary details well enough I didn’t ever feel lost. The characters are engaging and the mystery was intriguing and creepy enough to keep me turning the pages. But horror’s not really my thing so I probably won’t be picking up the earlier volumes.

My friend Rod Peckman has started getting some of his poems published in various online venues. I think they’re really good. I started a little page to keep track of them. Have a look at The poetry of Rod Peckman.

Julie Leung posted a lovely remembrance of Anita Rowland (that’s also a flaming rant against cancer). I started to leave a comment over there (actually I started it three weeks ago right after she posted), but I realized it was becoming more about me than it was about Anita or Julie, so here it is.

I started to write: Anita existed on the opposite end of the “talking to strangers” spectrum from me. And while that is true, it struck me that even by saying it that way I was highlighting the difference in mindset. I doubt Anita even recognized the concept of “strangers”. She was a master at connecting. Both connecting with people and connecting them with each other. I think that’s one of the most important things human beings are capable of. I’m thankful for the connections Anita made and for the example she set.

When I ran across the draft of this post (after putting up the Friday cat picture that has been the only content on Mad Times for a long while), I was reminded that bike blogger Kent Peterson (who happens to live three blocks from me) recently wrote a post including this gem: “I said I’m a guy who talks to strangers, I didn’t say I was any good at it.” Which comes to me as a minor epiphany. Of course you don’t have to be good at it. Of course it’s like everything else: you get better at it by being bad at it repeatedly.

I read a lot of blogs. It’s lessons like these and posts like the ones linked here that make it worth the effort.

We gave this spot over to catnip distribution. And there was much rejoicing.

Fifth Friday cat picture in as many weeks that was taken by Becky.

This was a long time ago in the house we called “Swamp Castle”. I’d forgotten about this habit of Alice’s until I saw the picture as I was moving everything from iPhoto into Lightroom this weekend.

Book 1 of his Midnighters series. I got this out of the library after hearing Westerfeld say interesting things on an episode of the Tor Podcast. (Just in case anyone at Tor is wondering if those things lead people to their books. In this case, at least, yes.)

Jessica Day is a teenager who has moved with her family from Chicago to the small town of Bixby, Oklahoma. Shortly after starting school she discovers that something strange happens to the world every night in Bixby but she and a few other kids in the town are the only ones who can perceive it.

One of the things I liked about it is that the strangeness has been going on for a long time prior to the arrival of the protagonist. While this is a handy storytelling device, allowing lots of plausible info-dumps, it also nicely defuses most of the aura of “chosen one” about Jessica since she has peers who have spent years working to make sense of their world.

The book is a quick read and the setting is intriguing enough I may pick up the next couple books.